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Rating, Commenting on, and Ranking Online Submissions

Today, we get into the meat and potatoes of Decision.io. We are going to go into the full submission and take a look at our core features including rating, commenting, note taking, and ranking. This is where the organization that Decision.io adds to the online submission management and group decision-making process becomes apparent.

If you’re joining in on our series of product feature posts for the first time, I recommend you take a look at some of the posts below.

Overall Rating and Commenting to Screen Submissions

To enter the full submissions page, you just click the “Full Submissions” button that you see under the title of each individual submission. You can also reach the full submissions page by clicking on the title of the submission. In this case, that would be “Wayne Enterprises”.

It is also possible to leave a comment on the overall online submission from this page by entering your comment within the comment box. By default, your comment will be categorized as private, meaning it will only be used internally. If you uncheck this box, your comment will be made public, and it can be included in a personalized feedback email to the owner of that submission.

You can also give a quick overall rating based on the limited information available in this submission’s “Quick View”. Just click the green, yellow, or red button. This quick overall rating is helpful in the early stages of a review process where you have a large number of submissions to whittle down before your team begins reviewing each submission in depth. Think of it as a screening tool.

Finally, the little notebook tab you see on the right causes a notepad to slide out from the right side. Here you can write and save notes that are attached to this particular portfolio. These notes are for your personal use only. Even your system administrator won’t be able to access these notes.

Let’s enter the full submission so that we can take a closer look at Wayne Enterprises.

View Administrative Categories

In the top half of the full submission view you will notice the title and website associated with the submission, a “Tags” text box, a grayed out rating button, an “Edit this Submission” button, and your administrative categories.

Whatever you type into the tags text box will be turned into a tag. Tagging can be a useful way to search for particular submissions in your online submission process. If you are a business incubator accepting applications from ambitious cleantech, b2c and b2b software, and wearable tech companies, you may want to assign tags that separate these submissions. With a quick search on the main submissions page, you’ll be able to make only submissions of a particular kind show.

You can also assign tags to submissions to ensure that those submissions are only seen by particular reviewers or review teams that also have matching tags. This is a great way to ensure that each submission goes to the reviewers that are best suited to review submissions of this particular type. It’s also a great way to divide the workload when you receive a large volume of applications.

TIP: You can make applicants assign tags to their application for you by creating fields with restricted answers such as a multiple choice or check box fields on your online application form!

The large rating button will receive a colour once you submit your ratings. It will change as your fellow reviewers also submit their ratings. It is a quick way to see the overall sentiment of your entire review team around a particular submission.

The “Edit this Submission” button is only visible for your system administrator. This allows the admin to add any information that the applicant may have forgotten at first. The admin can also attach any media attachments if need be.

Finally, the administrative categories are the ones you chose earlier. These aren’t rated categories — they are just there for your information.

View Your Decision Canvas

Below your administrative categories you have your decision canvas. Remember, these decision categories are not set in stone. You can make these categories reflect whatever your review team values in a submission.

The speech bubbles in the bottom right corner of each decision category allows each reviewer to leave a decision category specific comment. So rather than being restricted to commenting on the submission as a whole, you can target those comments at specific aspects of the submission.

Of course, if you want to take notes for your own eyes only, the note taking tab is available on the right side.

Keep Private Notes

Here you can see I have gone through and given each decision category a rating. The “Average Canvas Rating” automatically aggregates all of your individual ratings as you assign ratings. As you can see, it’s received an overall average of yellow. However, you can see below that I’ve given it a final rating of green. This is to ensure that the human component of online submission review is maintained. If you go against the average canvas rating as a reviewer, you should be prepared to justify your position with comments.

Rating and Commenting Individual Decision Criteria

Since I went against the average rating, you can see I justified it by attaching a comment to the “Team” decision category that explains why the strength of the founder overrides some of the weak ratings in other categories.

Here, I made a note to myself stating the potential I see in the founder, Lucius Fox, and that if he doesn’t get accepted into this incubator program, I should keep an eye out for future projects of his. That way, if my team isn’t on the same page as me, he isn’t lost forever.

See a Summary of Comments

Finally, you can leave a comment on the overall submission by entering it into the text box. As with the main submissions page, the default for any comments is private. You will also find all of your comments that you’ve left on this submission here along with the decision category to which it is attached. Below this we would also be able to see what our fellow reviewers left as comments, but only once everyone has completed the review of this submission in the given stage. This is to ensure that you don’t introduce any biases into your decision-making process.

Admin Only Comment History View

Viewing comment history is only possible for administrators. This allows an administrator to follow up with a reviewer and discuss any major changes of thought. It’s just another way to make your online submission review process transparent internally.

Rank Each Online Submission

Once you’re all done reviewing a submission, it will move to the bottom of the main submissions page, awaiting your overall ranking of the submission in comparison to the others. It’s as easy as dragging and dropping the submissions into place. Our users don’t generally rank submissions until the number of submissions remaining in the review process is a manageable number. There isn’t much use in ranking 1000 submissions!

There you have it! Your individual ratings and comments are automatically aggregated, organized, and meaningfully combined with the work of your entire review team. Come decision time, the decision maker will have all of the relevant information they need presented in a way that makes sense. Now, your decision-making process should be faster and more effective.

Do you see how Decision.io can help your organization streamline the online submission and decision-making process? Yeah? Well, get a free live demo today!